Thursday, December 13, 2018

A field demonstration conducted by Acacia Communications, in collaboration with Microsoft and Facebook, achieved the first 400G single carrier DWDM transmission over the 6,600 km Marea submarine cable between Virginia Beach, Virginia and Bilbao, Spain. The transmission employed Acacia’s AC1200 coherent module, which is powered by its Pico digital signal processor. Utilizing Acacia’s patented Fractional QAM modulation, the field demonstration achieved 400G transmission using approximately 4 bits/symbol, with a baud rate of nearly 70Gbaud. Additionally, modulation formats greater than 4 bits/symbol were utilized to achieve a spectral efficiency of 6.41 b/s/Hz on the same 6,600 km cable.

The Marea submarine cable, a joint project between Microsoft, Facebook, and global telecommunications infrastructure company Telxius, features an “open” design that allows it to evolve with technology and enables adoption of new technologies, such as the Acacia AC1200 coherent module.

“Transmission of 400G over 6,600 km is a significant milestone and demonstrates what can be achieved with higher performance transmission optics combined with a well-designed line system,” said Mark Filer, Principle Optical Engineer, Azure Networking, Microsoft Corp. “This field demonstration of an advanced solution that is just becoming commercially available highlights the value of Marea’s open architecture to evolve with the latest technology. By allowing early adoption of new technologies such as Acacia’s AC1200, we are able to increase the utilization of our deployed fiber, maximize our investment and improve network capacity.”

“We are excited to have completed this field demonstration on the Marea cable, with the first transmission of 400G on a single carrier, highlighting the performance and features of our AC1200 coherent module,” said Christian Rasmussen, Founder and Vice President of Digital Signal Processing and Optics at Acacia Communications, “We believe the benefits of our AC1200 module will help network operators improve their network utilization in a range of applications from edge DCI to submarine.”

Construction of the highest-capacity subsea cable to cross the Atlantic is now complete.

The 6,600 km MAREA subsea cable, which was jointly funded by Microsoft and Facebook, links Virginia Beach, Virginia to Bilbao, Spain. The cable will be managed by Telxius, Telefónica’s new infrastructure company. The cable features eight fiber pairs and an initial estimated design capacity of 160 Tbps.

The cable takes a more southern route than other transatlantic cables, which mostly connect northern Europe to the New York/New Jersey region.

At the European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC) in Rome, Acacia Communications demonstrated its AC1200 coherent module with dual-core design enabling 1.2 Tbps error-free transmission over fiber with 600 Gbps per wavelength.

The Acacia AC1200 module supports transmission capacity of up to 1.2 Tbps in a footprint that is 40 percent less than the size of the 5” x 7” modules that support transmission speeds of 400 Gbps today.

The module is based on Acacia’s Pico DSP ASIC, which utilizes two wavelengths that can be configured to support from 100 Gbps to 600 Gbps capacity each. The Acacia AC1200 supports a suite of advanced three-dimensional (3D) shaping features that may be optimized to enable performance approaching theoretical limits on a wide range of network configurations.

Acacia shipped its first AC1200 module customer samples in March 2018 and anticipates production to begin by the end of 2018.

Internet2 announced a new partnership with the National Science Foundation (NSF) to coordinate the use of commercial cloud platforms for scientific computing research needs.

Internet2 will serve as the coordinator, facilitator and administrator of the Exploring Clouds for Acceleration of Science (E-CAS) project, which will investigate the viability of commercial clouds as an option for leading-edge research computing and computational science supporting a range of academic disciplines.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud are named as the initial providers supporting the project.

Proposals will be selected from two categories:

Time-to-science: to achieve the best time-to-solution for scientific application and workflows that may be time or situation sensitive; and

Innovation: to explore innovative use of heterogeneous hardware resources, serverless applications and/or machine learning to support and extend application workflows.

“We are very excited to partner with NSF and work in collaboration with leading cloud providers to support a broad spectrum of scientific disciplines and help provide digital research platforms to a wider range of scientific endeavors,” said Howard Pfeffer, president and CEO of Internet2, and principal investigator on the E-CAS project. “For over 20 years, Internet2 has served to connect researchers who work together to solve common technology challenges, and to develop innovative solutions in support of their educational, research, and community service missions. This partnership is an extension of our commitment to supporting researchers and diversifying technology solutions for the benefit of the research and education community.”

"Since its inception, Google Cloud has been advancing state-of-the-art modern computing infrastructures, and today's scientific computing infrastructure provides a vast set of resources for researchers to leverage," said Kevin Kells, Director of Google for Education. "In this partnership with Internet2 and the National Science Foundation, we are encouraging the research community to accelerate scientific discovery by developing innovative applications that harness the global-scale services provided by Google Cloud."

Ciena reported revenue of $899.4 million for its fiscal fourth quarter ended October 31, 2018, up 20.8% year over year. Q4 net income per share was $0.34 GAAP, or $0.53 adjusted (non-GAAP).

For fiscal year 2018, Ciena reported revenue of $3.09 billion, as compared to $2.80 billion for fiscal year 2017.
“We achieved outstanding financial results in our fourth quarter and fiscal 2018 due to continued execution of our proven strategy," said Gary B. Smith, president and CEO, Ciena. "The combination of our innovation strength, successful interception of market trends and sustained ability to take share and outperform the market, along with a thriving industry environment, gives us tremendous confidence in both the near and longer term outlook for our business.”

The last remaining plot of land designated for development into a data centre sold for a higher-than-expected HK$5.45 billion ((US$697 million), according to the South China Morning Post. There were nine bidders for the 295,405 square foot property. The buyer is listed as Sunevision Holdings.

The 40GBase QSFP+ Bidi has two 20G channels that supports connections up to 100 meters on OM3 and up to 150 meters on OM4. It uses LC Duplex connector and the wavelength is 850nm. It is compliant with the QSFP MSA.

The Wireless LAN (WLAN) market accelerated in the second half 2018, boosted by higher-end products. WLAN prices rise with mix shift to Wave 2, 802.11ax and NBASE-T, according to a new report from Dell'Oro Group.

“The WLAN market outperformed in 3Q18, as price erosion slowed. Users opted for feature-rich products, such as Wave 2 access points and premises managed Controllers,” said Ritesh Patel, Industry Analyst at Dell’Oro Group. “This indicates purchases are coming from sophisticated users, which relate to large enterprises upgrading Ethernet switches and pulling along wireless LAN sales. We see the WLAN market entering a period when revenue growth may outpace unit growth, particularly as 802.11ax access points become material. The early to market 802.11ax products from Aerohive, Arris Ruckus, Huawei, and HPE are midrange or high-end boasting NBASE-T Ethernet. It will be a few more quarters before we see lower-end products” added Mr. Patel.

Hurricane Electric, which opererates the world’s largest IPv6-native Internet backbone, announced that it is the first Internet backbone in the world to connect to over 200 unique Internet exchanges.

Hurricane Electric now connects to the largest number of networks on the planet for both IPv6 and IPv4 and has been at the forefront of providing high-speed Internet connectivity to organizations throughout the world using: 100GE (100 Gigabit Ethernet), 10GE (10 Gigabit Ethernet), and GigE (1 Gigabit Ethernet) connections.

“Hurricane Electric’s goal has always been to provide as much Internet service as possible to as many people as possible,” said Mike Leber, President of Hurricane Electric. “It’s exciting to reach this milestone, ensuring that we have as much local connectivity as possible in each geographic market that we are present in. Continuing to connect to more locations will provide our customers and others with fewer hops, reduced latency, and greater throughput.”

MobiledgeX, the independent mobile edge computing provider founded by Deutsche Telekom, announced an agreement with SK Telecom to enable a new generation of connected devices, content and experiences, creating new business models and revenue opportunities leading into 5G.

MobiledgeX is focused on delivering developer-facing edge cloud services and bringing mobility to those services, dynamically placing application back-end as close to mobile devices as possible and removing them when not needed. MobiledgeX, Deutsche Telekom and Intel have partnered with Telecom Infra Project (TIP) to form an Edge Application Developer project group to ensure the gained insights and supporting source code are available to all.

Deutsche Telekom created MobiledgeX as an independent company to drive strategic collaboration across the world’s leading telecoms, public cloud providers, device makers and the surrounding ecosystem - enabling a new era of business models, operating efficiencies and mobile experiences. We are particularly excited to announce SK Telecom’s participation in this collaborative ecosystem where everybody wins. SK Telecom is a global leader in 5G which follows their rich tradition of innovation within their network, strategic partnerships and developer engagement. This new era is underway,” says Eric Braun, Chief Commercial Officer of MobiledgeX.

The company said its new BMR solution enables customers to build OLTs in small form factor modules while drawing the lowest power in extreme thermal environments. The device supports small form factor pluggable (SFP) and 10 Gb SFP (XFP) footprints.

“The PolarFire FPGA BMR solution is a game changer for our clients designing 10G PON applications because it fundamentally changes the way they build, deploy and maintain systems,” said Shakeel Peera, vice president of FPGA marketing for Microchip’s Programmable Solutions business unit. “The combination of PolarFire FPGAs and the new BMR technology enables designers to build unique, proprietary solutions that address the key challenges of reducing power consumption and heat dissipation of PON equipment, while delivering the small formfactor their end customers are demanding to expand remote deployment choices for carriers.”

Complementary Microchip solutions include the new SY88029L burst mode limiting amplifier. With burst mode signal detect time of less than 7 nanoseconds, the SY88029L is the first limiting amplifier fully compliant with XGSPON and NGPON2 timing requirements.